visit to
Francis I., called from its splendour the Field of the Cloth of Gold;
but in 1522 war was declared against France and the emperor again
welcomed to England. In 1521 she is represented by Shakespeare as
pleading for the unfortunate duke of Buckingham.

These early years of happiness and of useful influence and activity had,
however, been gradually giving way to gloom and disappointment. Between
January 1510 and November 1518 Catherine gave birth to six children
(including two princes), who were all stillborn or died in infancy
except Mary, born in 1516, and rumour did not fail to ascribe this
series of disasters to the curse pronounced in Deuteronomy on incestuous
unions. In 1526 the condition of Catherine's health made it highly
improbable that she would have more children. No woman had ever reigned
in England, alone and in her own right, and to avoid a fresh dispute
concerning the succession, and the revival of the civil war, a male heir
to the throne was a pressing necessity. The act of marriage, which
depended for its validity on the decision of the ecclesiastical courts,
had, on account of the numerous dissolutions and dispensations granted,
not then attained the security since assured to it by the secular law.
For obtaining dissolutions of royal marriages the facilities were
especially great. Pope Clement VII. himself permitted such a dissolution
in the case of Henry's own sister Margaret, in 1528, proposed later as a
solution of the problem that Henry should be allowed two wives,[2] and
looked not unfavourably, with the same aim, on the project for marrying
the duke of Richmond to Mary, a brother to a sister.[3] In Henry's case
also the irregularity of a union, which is still generally reprobated
and forbidden in Christendom, and which it was very doubtful that the
pope had the power to legalize, provided a moral justification for a
dissolution which in other cases did not exist. It was not therefore the
immorality of the plea which obstructed the papal decree in Henry's
favour, but the unlucky imprisonment at this time of Clement VII. at the
hands of Charles V., Catherine's nephew, which obliged the pope, placed
thus "between the hammer and the anvil," to pursue a policy of delay and
hesitation. Nor was the immorality of Henry's own character the primary
cause of the project of divorce. Had this been so, a succession of
mistresses would have served as well as a series of single wives. The
real occasion w